List of ethnic cleansing campaigns

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This article lists incidents that have been termed ethnic cleansing by some academic or legal experts. Not all experts agree on every case, particularly since there are a variety of definitions of the term ethnic cleansing. When claims of ethnic cleansing are made by non-experts (e.g. journalists or politicians) they are noted.

There is significant scholarly disagreement around the definition of ethnic cleansing and which events fall under this classification.[1]

Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern periods

Antiquity

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Judaean people being deported after the Siege of Lachish; wall relief from the South-West Palace at Nineveh

Early modern period

  • 11th to 16th century AD: In the Inca Empire, the mitma was a policy of forced resettlement employed by the empire. It involved the forceful migration of groups of extended families or ethnic groups from their home territory to lands recently conquered by the Incas. The objective was to transfer both loyalty to the state and a cultural baggage of Inca culture such as language, technology, economic and other resources into areas that were in transition.
  • 1071 - 1453 AD: The Turkish invasion and settlement of Anatolia (now Turkey), caused the displacement and replacement of the previous Greek and Armenian inhabited populations of Anatolia.
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Expulsions of Jews in Europe from 1100 to 1600
  • c. 1290 AD: Edward I of England expelled all Jews living in England in 1290 (see Edict of Expulsion).[8]
  • c. 1250–1500 AD: From the 13th to the 16th centuries many European countries expelled the Jews from their territory on at least 15 occasions. Spain was preceded by England, France and some German states, among many others, and succeeded by at least five more expulsions.
  • c. 1492–1614 AD: As a result of religious persecution, up to a quarter million Jews in Spain converted to Catholicism, those who refused (between 40,000 and 70,000) were expelled in 1492 following the Alhambra Decree. Those who did convert were subject of legal discrimination under the Limpieza de sangre system, which privileged Old Christians over New Christians. Many of the converts continued practising Judaism in secret, leading to the Inquisition. Shortly after the practice of Islam was outlawed and all of Spain's Muslims became nominally Christian.[9] The descendants of these converted Muslims were called Moriscos. After the 1571 suppression of the Morisco Revolt in the Alpujarras region, almost 80,000 Moriscos were relocated to other parts of Spain and some 270 villages and hamlets were repopulated with settlers brought from other regions. This was followed by a general Expulsion of the Moriscos between 1609–1614 which was nominally applied to the entire Spanish realm, but was carried out most thoroughly in the eastern region of Valencia. Although its overall success in terms of implementation is subject to academic debate and did not involve widespread violence, it is considered one of the first episodes of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in the modern western world.[10]
  • 1492 - 1800s: Indigenous Americans of North America and South America were dispossessed and killed (or died by introduced diseases) by British, Spanish and Portuguese colonialists and become a minority in their homelands. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term "genocide", considered the displacement of Native Americans by American settlers as a historical example of genocide.[11] Others, like historian Gary Anderson, contend that genocide does not accurately characterize any aspect of American history, suggesting instead that ethnic cleansing is a more appropriate term.[12]
  • 1556–1620: Plantations of Ireland. Land in Laois, Offaly, Munster and parts of Ulster was seized by the English crown and colonised with English settlers.[13] Ireland has been described as a "testing ground" for British colonialism, with the confiscation of land and expulsion of native Irish from their homelands being a rehearsal for the expulsion of the Native Americans by British settlers.[14][15]
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After Cromwell's conquest of Ireland, huge areas of land were confiscated and the Irish Catholics were banished to the lands of Connacht.
  • c. 1652 AD: After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Act of Settlement in 1652, the whole post-war Cromwellian settlement of Ireland has been characterised by historians such as Mark Levene and Alan Axelrod as ethnic cleansing, in that it sought to remove Irish Catholics from the eastern part of the country, but others such as the historian Tim Pat Coogan have described the actions of Cromwell and his subordinates as genocide.[16]
  • 1755–1757 AD: The Dzungar genocide (Chinese: 準噶爾滅族; lit. 'extermination of the Dzungar tribe') was the mass extermination of the Mongol Dzungar people by the Qing dynasty.[17] The genocide was perpetrated by Manchu generals of the Qing army, supported by Turkic oasis dwellers (now known as Uyghurs) who rebelled against Dzungar rule. Some scholars estimate that about 80% of the Dzungar population, or around 500,000 to 800,000 people, were killed by a combination of warfare and disease during or after the Qing conquest.
  • 1755–1764 AD: During the French and Indian War, the Nova Scotia colonial government, aided by New England troops, instituted a systematic removal of the French Catholic Acadian population of Nova Scotia – eventually removing thousands of settlers from the region and relocating them to areas in the Thirteen Colonies, Britain and France. Many eventually moved and settled in Louisiana and became known as Cajuns. Many scholars have described the subsequent death of over 50% of the deported Acadian population as an ethnic cleansing.[18]
  • 1788 - 1900s : Indigenous Australians are dispossessed and killed (or die of introduced diseases) by British colonialists and become a minority in their homelands.

19th century

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The Batak massacre, an example of ethnic cleansing by Ottoman irregular troops in Bulgaria in 1876.
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Portrait of Circassian refugees evicted from their towns and villages during the Circassian genocide. According to some authors, the Russian Empire massacred and forcibly deported 95-97% of all Circassians through military campaigns designated by the Russian army as “ochishchenie” (cleansing).[19][20]

20th century

1900s–1910s

  • The Herero and Namaqua genocide was a campaign of racial extermination and collective punishment that the German Empire undertook in German South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) against the Herero, Nama and San people. It is considered the first genocide of the 20th century.[42][43][44][45]Germany Acknowledges Genocide in Namibia but Stops Short of Reparations
  • During the Balkan Wars, ethnic cleansings were carried out in Kosovo, Macedonia, Sandžak and Thrace. At first, they were committed against the Muslim population, but later, they were also committed against Christians. Villages were burned and people were massacred.[46] The Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks burned villages and massacred Turkish civilians, but since then, the population of the Turkish-majority areas of the Bulgarian-occupied areas has remained almost unchanged.[47][48] The Turks usually massacred Bulgarian and Greek males who lived in the areas which they reoccupied, but they did not massacre any Greeks during the Second Balkan War, the women and children were also raped and frequently slaughtered during each massacre.[49] During the Second Balkan War, an ethnic cleansing campaign was carried out by the Ottoman Army and Turkish Bashi-bazouks exterminated the whole Bulgarian population of the Ottoman Adrianople Vilayet (an estimated 300,000 people before the war) and displacing the survivors of the massacres (60,000).[50] Under Greek occupation, Bulgarian Macedonians were persecuted, expelled from their homes and forced to move to regions of Greece which are located north of the Bulgarian border. The Bulgarians had expelled 100,000 Greeks from Macedonia and West Thrace before the territories were returned to Greece.[51] In addition to the dead, the aftermath of the war counts 890,000 people who permanently left their homes, of whom 400,000 fled to Turkey, 170,000 fled to Greece, 150,000[52] or 280,000 fled to Bulgaria.[53] The population size of Bulgarians in Macedonia was mostly reduced by forceful assimilation campaigns through terror, following the ban of the use of the Bulgarian language and declarations which are named "Declare yourself a Serb or die"; signers were required to renounce their Bulgarian identity on paper in Serbia and Greece.[48][49] Anywhere between 120,000 and 270,000 Albanians were killed through both wars and 60,000 to 300,000 were deported from Old Serbia by late 1914.
  • The 1914 Greek deportations in East Thrace and Anatolia (Turkey) have been described as an ethnic cleansing campaign by scholars Matthias Bjørnlund and Taner Akçam.[54][55]
  • During the Bulgarian occupation of Serbia in WWI, the civilian population was exposed to various measures of repression, including mass internment, forced labor, and a Bulgarisation policy. Bulgarian policy in Macedonia, and to some degree in occupied Serbia, was motivated by what historian Alan Kramer has termed a 'dynamic of destruction' a desire not just to defeat the enemy militarily, but also to erase all traces of its culture and destroy any evidence that it had ever been there at all.[56] Academic Paul Mojzes writes that "ethnic cleansing (at a minimum)" took place during 1915-1918.[57]
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    Greek and Armenian refugee children near Athens, Greece, in 1923, following their expulsion from Turkey.
  • The Armenian genocide and the Greek genocide which occurred in Anatolia (Turkey) both during and after World War I was implemented in two phases: Turks committed the wholesale killing of the entire able-bodied male population through massacres and forced labor, this killing was followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and the infirm to the Syrian Desert on death marches. Between 2 and 3 million Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians were killed during this period.[58][59] In addition to being described as a genocide, it is often described as an ethnic cleansing campaign in academic literature. Considered a single event by some historians, this genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century and it was also the largest genocide in terms of the number of victims until the Holocaust.[60][61]
  • The Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Don Cossacks during the Russian Civil War, in 1919–1920.[62] Geoffrey Hosking stated "It could be argued that the Red policy towards the Don Cossacks amounted to ethnic cleansing. It was short-lived, however, and soon abandoned because it did not fit with normal Leninist theory and practice".[63]
  • Through the Interwar period, between 90,000 and 300,000 Albanians were deported from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia[64] and up to 80,000 were killed during the Yugoslav colonization of Kosovo.[65]

1920s–1930s

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Greek refugees from Smyrna, 1922
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Deportation of the Soviet Koreans in 1937
  • In 1920–21, the Greek army on the Yalova-Gemlik Peninsula burned dozens of Turkish/Muslim villages, engaging in large-scale violence and ethnic cleansing.[66]
  • The population exchange between Greece and Turkey has been described as an ethnic cleansing.[67] Over 1.2 million ethnic Greeks were expelled from Turkey in 1922-1924 while Greece expelled 400,000 Muslims. In 1928, 1,104,216 Ottoman Greek refugees were still living in Greece.[68]
  • Pacification of Libya, Italian authorities committed ethnic cleansing in the Cyrenaica region of Libya by forcibly removing and relocating 100,000 members of the Cyrenaican indigenous population from their valuable land and property that was slated to be given to Italian settlers.[69]
  • The Chinese Kuomintang Generals Ma Qi and Ma Bufang launched campaigns of expulsion in Qinghai and Tibet against ethnic Tibetans. The actions of these Generals have been called Genocidal by some authors.[70][verification needed]
  • Authors Uradyn Erden Bulag called the events that follow as a Genocide while David Goodman named them ethnic cleansing: The Republic of China supported Ma Bufang when he launched seven extermination expeditions into Golog, eliminating thousands of Tibetans.[71] Some Tibetans counted the number of times he attacked them, remembering the seventh attack which made their lives impossible.[72] Ma was highly anti-communist, and he and his army wiped out many Tibetans in the northeast and eastern Qinghai, and they also destroyed Tibetan Buddhist Temples.[73][74][75]
  • The Mexican Repatriation from 1929 to 1939 in which mass deportations and repatriations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans occurred in response to poverty and nativist fears which were triggered by the Great Depression in the United States has been called ethnic cleansing. An estimated forty to sixty percent of the 355,000 to 2 million people who were repatriated were birthright U.S. citizens – an overwhelming number of them were children. Voluntary repatriations were much more common than deportations.[76][77][78] Legal scholar Kevin Johnson states that it meets modern legal standards for ethnic cleansing, arguing it involved the forced removal of an ethnic minority by the government.[79]
  • The Simele massacre of 1933 was carried out by the Royal Iraqi Army under the command of Bakr Sidqi, as well as with the participation of Arab and Kurdish tribes. It's estimated that nearly 6,000 Assyrians perished as a result of the massacre, with 100s of villages flattened.[80]
  • The deportation of 172,000 Soviet Koreans by the Soviet government in September 1937, in which Koreans were moved away from the Korean border and deported to Central Asia, where they were made to do forced labor.[81]

1940s

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Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany. Poles are led to trains under German army escort, as part of the ethnic cleansing of western Poland annexed to the German Reich following the invasion.
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The bodies of the dead lie awaiting burial in a mass grave at the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen
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Emaciated corpses of Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto
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Prisoners sort through shoes thought to belong to Hungarian Jews who were murdered in the gas chambers after arrival to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
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Post-World War II border changes of Poland. The respective Polish, German, and Ukrainian populations were expelled, or ethnically cleansed by the Soviet Union and Poland.
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Massacres of Poles in Volhynia in 1943. Most Poles of Volhynia (now in Ukraine) had either been murdered or had fled the area.

1950s

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A colour photograph of two young Yemenite Jews in Ma'abarot refugee camps.

1960s

1970s

  • The Arab Belt program was an ethnic cleansing campaign launched by the Ba'athist Syrian government of Hafez al-Assad between 1973 and 1976.[140][141][142] By implementing its Arab Belt programme, the Syrian government sought to change the demographics of northern parts of the Al-Hasakah region by sending Arab settlers, and change its ethnic composition of the population in favor of Arabs to the detriment of other ethnic groups, particularly the Syrian Kurds.[143][144] By the end of the programme in 1976, Syrian government forcibly deported approximately 140,000 Kurds living in 332 villages and confiscated their lands around a 180-mile strip across the north-eastern boundary-regions of Syria with Turkey and Iraq. Tens of thousands of Arab settlers coming from Raqqa were then granted these lands to establish settlements by the Ba'athist government.[145][146]
  • There was an ethnic cleansing of the Greek population of the areas under Turkish military occupation in Cyprus in 1974–76 during and after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. This has been the subject of litigation in the European Court of Human Rights in cases including Loizidou v. Turkey and the European Court of Justice in cases like Apostolides v Orams.[147][148][149]
  • Following the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1973 and the communist victory two years later, the Kingdom of Laos's coalition government was overthrown by the communists. The Hmong people, who had actively supported the anti-communist government, became targets of retaliation and persecution. The government that took over in Laos has been accused of committing Genocide against the Hmong,[150][151] with up to 100,000 killed.[152]
  • The Communist Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia disproportionately targeted ethnic minority groups, including ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese and Thais. In the late 1960s, an estimated 425,000 ethnic Chinese lived in Cambodia; by 1984, as a result of Khmer Rouge genocide and emigration, only about 61,400 Chinese remained in the country. The small Thai minority along the border was almost completely exterminated, with only a few thousand managing to reach safety in Thailand. The Muslim Cham Minority suffered serious purges with as much as 80% of their population exterminated. The Khmer's racial supremacist ideology was responsible for this ethnic purge. A Khmer Rouge order stated that henceforth "The Cham nation no longer exists on Kampuchean soil belonging to the Khmers" (U.N. Doc. A.34/569 at 9).[153][154]
  • Subsequent waves of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Burma and many refugees inundated neighbouring Bangladesh including 250,000 in 1978 as a result of the Operation Dragon King in Arakan.[155][156]

1980s

1990s

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The cemetery at the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and Cemetery to Genocide Victims
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Bhutanese refugees in Nepal
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Ethnic cleansing of a Croatian home
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An elderly Serb refugee in a tractor trailer leaving her home during Operation Storm
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Kosovo Albanian refugees in 1999

21st century

2000s

  • In 2003, Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti Pygmies, told the UN's Indigenous People's Forum that during the Congo Civil War, his people were hunted down and eaten as though they were game animals. Both sides of the war regarded them as "subhuman" and some say their flesh can confer magical powers. Makelo asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.[220][221]
  • From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Indonesian paramilitaries organized and armed by Indonesian military and police killed or expelled large numbers of civilians in East Timor.[222] After the East Timorese people voted for independence in a 1999 referendum, Indonesian paramilitaries retaliated, murdering Separatists and levelling most towns. More than 200,000 people either fled or were forcibly taken to Indonesia before East Timor achieved full independence.[223]
  • Since the mid-1990s the central government of Botswana has been trying to move the San people, also known as Bushmen, out of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. As of October 2005, the government has resumed its policy of forcing all San off their lands in the Game Reserve, using armed police and threats of violence or death.[224] Many of the involuntarily displaced San live in squalid resettlement camps and some have resorted to prostitution and alcoholism, while about 250 others remain or have surreptitiously returned to the Kalahari to resume their independent lifestyle.[225] Festus Mogae defended the actions, saying, "How can we continue to have Stone Age creatures in an age of computers?"[226][227]
  • Since 2003, Sudan has been widely accused of carrying out a Genocide Campaign against several black ethnic groups in Darfur, in response to a rebellion by Africans alleging mistreatment. Sudanese irregular militia known as the Janjaweed and Sudanese military and police forces killed an estimated 200,000, expelled around two million, and burned 800 villages.[228] A 14 July 2007 article noted that in the previous two months up to 75,000 Arabs from Chad and Niger crossed the border into Darfur. Most were relocated by the Sudanese government to former villages of displaced non-Arab people. Some 200,000 were killed and 2.5 million were forced to flee to refugee camps in Chad after their homes and villages were destroyed.[229]
  • At least one additional thousand Serbs fled their homes during the 2004 unrest in Kosovo and numerous religious and cultural objects were burned down.[230][231]
  • During the Iraq Civil War and consequent Iraqi insurgency (2011–2013), entire neighborhoods in Baghdad were ethnically cleansed by Shia and Sunni militias.[232][233] Some areas were evacuated by every member of a particular group due to lack of security, moving into new areas because of fear of reprisal killings. As of 21 June 2007, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 2.2 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 2 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.[234][235][236]
  • The Assyrian exodus from Iraq from 2003 until present is often described as ethnic cleansing. Although Iraqi Christians represent less than 5% of the total Iraqi population, they make up 40% of the refugees now living in nearby countries, according to UNHCR.[237][238] In the 16th century, Christians constituted half of Iraq's population.[239] In 1987, the last Iraqi census counted 1.4 million Christians.[240] Following the 2003 invasion and the resultant growth of militant Islamism, Christians' total numbers slumped to about 500,000, of whom 250,000 live in Baghdad.[241] Furthermore, the Mandaean and Yazidi communities are at the risk of elimination due to the ongoing atrocities by Islamic extremists.[242][243] A 25 May 2007 article noted that in the past 7 months only 69 people from Iraq had been granted refugee status in the United States.[244]
  • In October 2006, Niger announced that it would deport Arabs living in the Diffa region of eastern Niger to Chad.[245] This population numbered about 150,000.[246] Nigerien government forces forcibly rounded up Arabs in preparation for deportation, during which two girls died, reportedly after fleeing government forces, and three women suffered miscarriages. Niger's government eventually suspended the plan.[247]
  • In 1950, the Karen had become the largest of 20 minority groups participating in an insurgency against the military dictatorship in Burma. The conflict continues as of 2008. In 2004, the BBC, citing aid agencies, estimates that up to 200,000 Karen have been driven from their homes during decades of war, with 120,000 more refugees from Burma, mostly Karen, living in refugee camps on the Thai side of the border. Many accuse the military government of Burma of ethnic cleansing.[248] As a result of the ongoing war in minority group areas more than two million people have fled Burma to Thailand.[249]
  • Civil unrest in Kenya erupted in December 2007.[250] By 28 January 2008, the death toll from the violence was at around 800.[251] The United Nations estimated that as many as 600,000 people have been displaced.[252][253] A government spokesman claimed that Odinga's supporters were "engaging in ethnic cleansing".[254]
  • The 2008 attacks on North Indians in Maharashtra began on 3 February 2008. Incidences of violence against North Indians and their property were reported in Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad, Beed, Nashik, Amravati, Jalna and Latur. Nearly 25,000 North Indian workers fled Pune,[255][256] and another 15,000 fled Nashik in the wake of the attacks.[257][258]
  • In May 2008, xenophobic riots erupted in South Africa. Within three weeks 80,000 were displaced and 62 killed, with 670 injured in the violence when South Africans ejected non-nationals in a nationwide ethnic cleansing/xenophobic outburst. The most affected foreigners were Somalis, Ethiopians, Indians, Pakistanis, Zimbabweans and Mozambiqueans. Local South Africans were also caught up in the violence. Arvin Gupta, a senior UNHCR protection officer, said the UNHCR did not agree with the City of Cape Town that those displaced by the violence should be held at camps across the city.[259]
  • In August 2008, the 2008 South Ossetia war broke out when Georgia launched a military offensive against South Ossetian separatists, leading to military intervention by Russia, during which Georgian forces were expelled from the separatist territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. During the fighting, 15,000[260] ethnic Georgians living in South Ossetia were forced to flee to Georgia proper, and Ossetian militias burned their villages to the Ground to prevent their return.

2010s

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Refugees of the fighting in the Central African Republic, 19 January 2014

2020s

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Mass grave of civilians in Tigray
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1,500 Ukrainian children from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia at Yevpatoria, Russian-occupied Crimea, October 2022

See also

References

Further reading

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